Add vRO 8.x extension to vCenter Web Client

In previous versions of vRealize Orchestrator and with the vCenter Flash Web Client, it was very straight forward to add the extension to the vCenter Flash Web Client. You simply ran the vRO workflow “Register vCenter Orchestrator as a vCenter Server extension” and that was it. If you do that with vRO 8.x you will see an error in vCenter that it could not download the plugin. The reason is that the plugin is missing on the vRO server and therefore vCenter cannot download it. So what we need to do is to download the plugin manually and copy to the vRO Server and then run the workflow to register. The detailed steps are described here: Configure vRealize Orchestrator Plugin for vSphere Web Client. Essentially you have to download the plugin from here Technical Preview of Orchestrator plug-in for vSphere Web Client and then copy the plugin with scp to /data/vco/usr/lib/vco/downloads/vco-plugin.zip on the vRO server and then run the workflow mentioned above. This however does not integrate into the HTML5 client, only in the flash client. Now you say that vSphere 7 doesn’t have a flash client. Yes, you are right, however you still have to do this step. For the HTML5 client we need an additional step. We need to download another plugin and copy it to the vCenter Server. The detailed steps are described here: Install vRealize Orchestrator Plug-in for vSphere Client.

• Change default shell to bash so that you can copy with scp. There might be other methods to accomplish this but changing default shell is one way. Connect with SSH to VCSA
  • Toggling the vCenter Server Appliance default shell (2100508)
  • Enter the shell by tying shell
  • Change default shell by typing chsh -s /bin/bash root
• Download the Beta Plugin from here:
  • https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/get-download?downloadGroup=VCOIN-BETA
• Use scp to copy the plugin to
  • /usr/lib/vmware-vsphere-ui/plugin-packages/vcoin-html-plugin.zip
• Access the vCenter Server Appliance with ssh
• Change directory
  • cd /usr/lib/vmware-vsphere-ui/plugin-packages
• Unzip the package with
  • unzip vcoin-html-plugin.zip -d vro-plugin
• Change the owner permission on the plugin with
  • chown -R vsphere-ui vro-plugin
• Delete the zip file
  • rm vcoin-html-plugin.zip
• Restart the vSphere Client
  • service-control –restart vsphere-ui

This is all Beta and no official support for vSphere 7. I however followed these steps in my home lab and the plugin worked flawlessly, even with vSphere 7. For a production environment you want to wait till this is all supported. The following was mentioned as a response to the question when this will be ready for production. “We are considering to release it with vRO 8.3 if there are no change in plans.” We are now at vRO 8.1.